There's a hardcore RPG for Roku?

Is there a hardcore RPG for Roku? No, not yet, but I'm working on one.

My name is Ben, and I'm not a programmer. I made a mod for Legend of Grimrock in 2013 called "Master Quest" (it's still the number one downloaded mod in the Grimrock Steam Workshop), and there was a little Lua coding involved, which happens to be somewhat similar to BrightScript (the Roku programming language), so I guess I'm a tiny little bit of a programmer. But not really.

I started working on my as-yet untitled RPG/Adventure game in August 2014. I read a bunch of tutorials and worked through coding a few sample "channels" in the Roku SDK, and decided to jump in and make a game. I'm optimistically hoping to release my first ever indie game by the end of 2015, but we'll see.

Why Roku? Well, it's quirky, limited, not very user friendly (to program on), proprietary, more limited, etc. Those are all bad things. Which is good, I think, because no one wants to make games for Roku, so there are hardly any. Gamasutra reported that in 2014, about 500 games launched PER DAY for iOS, with another 250 per day for Android. That's insane. Apple.com says they have over a quarter MILLION games in the App Store. Since Roku opened up for game development a few years back, the total number of games for Roku (at the time of this writing) is still under 100. That's like 1 per month. And three fourths of them are lousy cheap junk, leaving the platform with about 20-25 decent-to-good games, all of which are casual (as far as I can tell - I haven't played all of them).

So the way I see it, there are a few million Rokus out there, and there's got to be a certain (albeit small) percentage of Roku users who would love to see a serious game available that can be played in the living room on the big screen like an old-school 8-bit or 16-bit console game.

So what about this RPG? The picture of a small key above is a "copper key" from my game, a dungeon action-adventure RPG that is a cross between Legend of Grimrock (in 2-D) and Legend of Zelda (top-down), presented in ancient classical monochrome green! There will be NO random dungeon generation (blech!), everything is hand-crafted so that there are actually good puzzles, well thought out layouts and challenges, and an immersive storyline in the form of notes and messages. There will not be "thousands" or even "hundreds" of unique weapons, gear, spells, monsters, etc, just a nice reasonable few dozen, making your discoveries actually meaningful and rewarding. Most importantly, there will be no ads or in-game micro transactions of any kind, ever, for the rest of my life, and I'll put in my last-will-and-testament to never add them for at least 100 years after I die. Seriously.

Next time - more about my background and who I am, more about the game (with maybe a screenshot), and more about what it's like developing for the Roku,

Ben